The independently owned Goole Times has produced a trilogy of books
chronicling the wartime years in the town and surrounding district.
After
six years of research including extracts from 160 newspaper articles,
the Goole at War books – totalling more than 240,000 words – have
finally been completed with the help of freelance journalist Mike Marsh.
Peter
Butler, editor of the Goole Times, published by Chronicle Publications,
said: “We set out to uncover stories of personal experience and place
them on record before they were lost to posterity, to reflect in detail
the war’s impact on daily life in our area, and set it all in context
against the background of the war at large.
“So there is now a
unique account of how the war touched individual local lives, what
happened to people of all ages and backgrounds, how they played their
own part in the war, in uniform or on the Home Front, what they saw and
thought or felt at the time.”
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Marsh joined the Times as a trainee more than 50 years ago and spent 23 years working at the BBC.
He
used contemporary reports and documents as well as personal letters
written from the front line and included scores of interviews he
conducted along the way.
The 160 newspaper articles, all
published in the Goole Times, served to attract reader feedback,
letters and photographs, which have also been included in the books.
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Marsh said: “The individual experiences of some local people add up to remarkable stories by any standards.
“One
man survived an appalling 50 days adrift on a raft in the Atlantic and
was rescued when he was so desperate he was about surrender himself to
the milling sharks.
“Another, as a prisoner of war, used a pen-knife to remove the floor of a railway wagon piece by piece in order to escape.”
A copy of the three-volume history was presented to Goole Town Council to mark the completion of the project.
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